Chapter 8 - Very Recent History and the Nuclear Anthropocene

Summary

Climate change history often (and rightly) highlights the plight of the Global South and poorer countries, but zeroing in on the nuclear Anthropocene shows how ubiquitous were radioactive toxins especially in the northern hemisphere. This story has been largely missed because, as military leaders detonated 520 nuclear bombs into the atmosphere from 1945-1963, the fallout that settled down became part of “background” or “natural” radiation. In the same decades that manmade radioactive isotopes began to circle the globe, so too did new classes of pesticides, herbicides, and chemical pollutants from new industries producing plastics, aluminum and a host of goods that contaminated landscapes. The blanketing of the earth with anthropogenic toxins was so encompassing, the scale so grand, that this major change to the planetary eco-system has been hard to discern. A focus on the nuclear Anthropocene reconfigures our sense of scale, and with it, time and human agency.